IxDA Submission: Learning to See, Seeing to Learn Observing and giving names to things in the natural world—the birds, mushrooms, plants, animals and insects around us—is an important, age-old activity. With a name, not only can we connect to a whole world of information, but a name gives us a way to communicate and share our collective insights over time. The goal of work our work is to enable individuals of all ages and levels of expertise to engage in and contribute to local scientific endeavors. We focus on stream insect identification because its a common environmental education activity; it’s important to anglers who tie insect-mimicking flies; and it’s critical to the biomonitoring work of community- based watershed groups, researchers and regulatory agencies who monitor water quality impacts and the health of freshwater resources. The presence or absence of aquatic macroinvertebrates influences environmental decision-making and policy at the community, state, and federal level. However, learning to see and identify these insects with the eye of entomologist is challenging. Volunteers and students typically rely on keys that are text-heavy with simple line drawings, or field guides and flash cards with static, low-resolution photography and disconnected annotations full of technical jargon. We saw the opportunity to use an emerging class of gigapixel image technology and online viewers to design an innovative new platform to make the process of learning to see and identify organisms more visual and engaging, without sacrificing scientific detail. By providing access to a high quality, easy-to-use open educational resource, we enable the broader public to actively participate in water quality biomonitoring activities, and to look in wonder at the amazing insects in our waterways. Our multi-touch gigapixel collection viewer allows users to seamlessly zoom from macro to micro and back again, without losing a sense of scale, position, and orientation. The viewer dynamically reveals contextual information in direct response to a user’s exploration. Our multimedia annotation feature uses images, text, sound and video to provide insight into the unique characteristics of each insect and support deeper observation. We evaluated our application with youth, environmental educators, watershed volunteers and experts-in-training. Their responses have been unequivocally positive. Each group perceived the value and recognized the need for this kind of unique learning resource, particularly to engage the next generation of digital learners. This project is a cross-disciplinary collaboration between three institutions: the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments. It has been developed in close partnership with regional environmental education and watershed groups. Guiding our work is the larger goal of finding relevant ways to unlock the expertise and collections of a natural history museum to better serve and engage the public in looking deeply, noticing and becoming better observers of natural world around them. _______ FOLLOW LIPSapp Classic Radio _______ FB: r-js/1vz7Pcz / TW: r-js/1kHd2Qt / Listen to LIPSapp Classic Radio r-js/1dOIQ18 #classicrock #rollingstones #ledzeppelin #santana #eagles #zztop #thewho #beatles #elvis #jimihendrix #dylan #acdc #michaeljackson #pinkfloyd #madonna #u2
Posted on: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 19:05:18 +0000
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